Nigel Farage became the first UK politician to get an audience with President Elect Donald Trump this week, where they chatted about “victory, global politics and the status of Brexit.” Also on the agenda was a bust of Winston Churchill.

Nigel Farage said he was “especially pleased by the very positive reaction to idea that Sir Winston Churchill’s bust should be put back in Oval Office”.

There’s been an ongoing row over this since at least 2009.

It threatens not to be resolved despite repeated fact checks (and indeed this article) because the truth is complicated.

Additionally because it is convenient for some to claim, as Boris Johnson implied in a column for The Sun in March, that President Obama chose to move the bust from the Oval Office – the official office of the President – as a “snub” to the British.

The Foreign Secretary wrote in March: “Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire.”

This bust of Winston Churchill has developed into something more than a piece of sculpted bronze – it has become a bit of a political hot potato.

The facts

The confusion comes because there are two busts of Winston Churchill – both by Jacob Epstein, according to the New Yorker.

They reside in two different places – one, which was only ever loaned to the White House by the British, was returned to the British ambassador’s residence.

The other sits in the White House’s family quarters, outside the President’s private study.

The loaned bust was moved from the Oval Office to make way for a bust of Martin Luther King when Barack Obama became President.

President Obama explained: “As the first African American president [I thought] it might be appropriate to have a bust of Martin Luther King in my office to remind me of all the hard work of a lot of people who had somehow allowed me to have the privilege of holding this office.”

Just to complicate matters further, there’s actually a third bust of Winston Churchill too, which was unveiled inside Congress’s statuary hall in 2013 by Nicholas Soames MP, Winston Churchill’s grandson.

One imagines it’s hard to move around the Capitol for busts of Winston Churchill.

This new Churchill bust was also by Jacob Epstein. It’s not clear why the other bust couldn’t just be moved from the private residence to the Oval Office, though President Bush mentioned he “lamented” not having a proper Churchill bust to put in the office. Perhaps it was being renovated.

“He was a man of great courage,” President Bush said at the time. “He knew what he believed. And it really went after it in a way that seemed like a Texan to me.”

In any case, the new president liked the new bust so much, he decided to place it in the Oval Office.

14 February 2009

This is where the rather odd British Embassy statement about it being lent “in the wake of 9/11 as a signal of the strong transatlantic relationship” comes in.

They do, however, confirm the bust was only ever on loan from the Government’s Art Collection.

17 July 2012

Mitt Romney enters the fray, with the bust of Winston Churchill back as a political potato. This time, however, Romney may also have been using the bronze not only to berate Obama, but to mollify some hurt British egos.

Speaking to a group of supporters in London, a day after he suggested that Britain wasn’t ready for the Olympics, he said: “You know, one of—one of my heroes was a man who had an extraordinary turn of phrase…. And this man, Winston Churchill, used to have his bust in the Oval Office. And if I’m president of the United States, it’ll be there again.”

24 January 2015

More fisti-busts, this time from Republican senator Ted Cruz.

“One of the very first acts President Obama did upon being elected was sending Churchill’s bust back to the UK, and I think that foreshadowed everything that was to come the next six years,” he claims at Iowa Freedom Summit.

After another miniature row over minutiae, Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier told The Washington Post: “the point is that Great Britain offered to extend the loan of the bust at the end of the George W. Bush administration, and the administration rejected the offer and returned the bust.” She also pointed out that the White House did not ask for the loaned bust of Churchill back.

“My private office is called the Treaty Room. Right outside the door of the Treaty Room so that I see it every day, including on weekends when I’m going into that office to watch a basketball game, the primary image I see is a bust of Winston Churchill.

“It’s there voluntarily ‘cause I can do anything on the second floor.”

Speaking of his predecessor’s Oval Office bust, he said “there are only so many tables you where you can put busts or it starts looking a little cluttered.”

“I thought it was appropriate and I suspect most people here in the UK might agree, that as the first African American president it might be appropriate to have a bust of Martin Luther King in my office to remind me of all the hard work of a lot of people who had somehow allowed me to have the privilege of holding this office.”

12 November 2016

Nigel Farage becomes the first UK politician to get an audience with President Trump.

Top of the agenda, he inquires whether Mr Trump might like to get the second bust back on show at the Oval Office.

He claims to receive a “very positive reaction”, though it remains to be seen if the British Embassy will to re-offer the loan.

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